Examines the social, political, and emotional forces that shaped the lives and art of nineteenth-century poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose courtship ranks with the great love stories of all time. Elizabeth, at thirty-nine, was a poet of international fame and unmarried, confined by illness, morphine, and the tyranny of her father. Robert Browning, an admired young poet and playwright and devotee of Elizabeth's, had written to Elizabeth...